In this interview Gordon tells Kate Manchester a brief version of his cheese-y story, how his life as a punk rock activist blended smoothly into a job at the local worker-owned cooperative grocery store, Rainbow Grocery. He tells how he first fell in love with an alpine cheese–a delightfully aged Gruyere, and since that moment, has been learning the wheys of the curds and spreading the cheese gospel.

Edgar gives Vermont a shout-out in this interview (this lovely state, “with fewer people than the city I grew up in!” he quips), and spends a few minutes talking about the innovative community cheese caves up in the Northeast Kingdom. In coordination with Cabot Creamery, Jasper Hill Farm runs a massive cheese aging facility, allowing farmers to sell their milk and reap the benefit of turning it into a value-added product, without the immense outlays of capital it would take an individual farmer to build such a facility.

Leave a Reply

Read the Book

Witty and irreverent, informative and provocative, Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge is the highly readable story of Gordon Edgar's unlikely career as a cheesemonger at San Francisco's worker-owned Rainbow Grocery Cooperative. A former punk-rock political activist, Edgar bluffed his way into his cheese job knowing almost nothing, but quickly discovered a whole world of amazing artisan cheeses. There he developed a deep understanding and respect for the styles, producers, animals, and techniques that go into making great cheese.